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President Barack Obama is expected to give a big boost to community colleges in his State of the Union address Tuesday night. The President has proposed making tuition at two-year public colleges free for students in good standing. If the proposal passes Congress—and that’s a big if—can community colleges handle a surge in students?

Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory may once again be home to the world’s fastest supercomputer. It was in 2012, but that title only lasted six months — then a computer in China took the top spot. But the U.S. recently put aside more than $400 million to keep itself in the race.

The supercomputer at Oak Ridge right now, called Titan, is the size of a basketball court and sounds like a jet engine. It can make 27 quadrillion — that’s 27 followed by 15 zeros — calculations per second.

“It’s almost like it’s alive,” says Buddy Bland, director of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. “It has a pulse to it. You can feel it in your body when you walk in the room.”

These kinds of machines are used to do incredibly complex simulations of real-world things, such as analyzing weather patterns over time or predicting new chemical combinations in drugs. Faster computers mean more scientific breakthroughs.

But Bland says like any computer, whether it’s Titan or your personal laptop, will be basically obsolete in a few years.

“Because we can go out and buy a new machine for less than it costs to pay the maintenance of the old machine,” he says.

The U.S. has been a leader in supercomputing for decades, and staying up-to-date and ahead of the pack is pricy. Oak Ridge’s next computer, called Summit, could cost up to $280 million.

Yet Congress has funded supercomputing with gusto. In November, the Department of Energy pledged $425 million to help build Summit and a computer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) says it’s a priority that stretches across party lines.

“This is a case where the Obama administration and I and others in Congress since 2008 have had the same goal: We wanted to double funding for supercomputing,” he says.

Second, private companies can apply for time on the computers to develop products more quickly. For example, Procter and Gamble has used Oak Ridge’s Titan to research how the skin might react to its products.

And then there’s something that has non-monetary value: pride.

“It’s like being number one in football,” Alexander says. “We like the idea of having the fastest supercomputer in the world, and we have had that at Oak Ridge.”

Summit is expected to go live in 2017, but Oak Ridge isn’t calling it the fastest yet — By that time, some other country may be building one that’s even faster.

You hear about the average national gasoline price, but it’s often different from the station down the block. So why are prices so inconsistent from station to station, not to mention state to state?

A gallon of gasoline costs about 50 percent more in New York than Missouri. Taxes vary by as much as 35 cents a gallon, according to the American Petroleum Institute. Geography plays a role, too. States like Missouri and Oklahoma are near lots of refineries, and those refineries have pipeline access to cheaper crude supplies from the U.S. and Canada. Finally, state and local regulations produce many different varieties of gasoline, with different ethanol blends, octane requirements and emissions standards.

With a low not seen in a quarter century, China's economic growth dropped to 7.4 percent in 2014. As reported by the WSJ, some economists predict that disappointing numbers from 2014 are just the start of a global deceleration of growth.

2,000

That's about how many times Ronald Reagan used the word "freedom" for every million words in his State of the Union addresses, the Atlantic reported. He also lead the pack on "god." The Atlantic has an automatic tool showing frequently-used words by president.

50 percent

You may have noticed disparities in gas prices from station to station, but what about state to state? For example, a gallon of gasoline costs about 50 percent more in New York than Missouri. Turns out, there's a lot of factors that play into why you'll pay more or less for a tank of gas in different states.

46 percent

President Barack Obama's approval rating heading into Tuesday's State of the Union address. It's a bump up from the past year, the New York Times' Upshot reported, and it'll become more important in the homestretch of Obama's second term and looking to Democrats chances in 2016.

27 quadrillion

That’s 27 followed by 15 zeros, and it's also the number of calculations per second the Titan supercomputer at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory can compute. And it's not even the fastest in the world. That title is currently held by a supercomputer in China. It's why Congress has begun funding supercomputing with gusto, pledging over $400 million to building Oak Ridge's next supercomputer.

80

That's how many of the world's richest people it would take to match the collective wealth of the poorer half of the population, Quartz reported. That's a sharp drop from 2010, when you would have needed 388 super-rich to do the same.

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